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“Okay,” Zelda says, in that trained strenuously polite voice of hers, one that says she wants to rip the head off whoever she is talking to but, for whatever reason, cannot. “I need you to talk.”
Her uniform is in top shape today, and she relishes the lack of her childish former outfit she wore when she was still falsely convinced she could climb trees and in any way desired it. The blue of her commander jacket shines in the sun, the white of her skirt cascading from underneath, to honor the Goddess and to honor the legacy she has become a proud bearer of. Her boots are polished and do not sport dirt. Her hair is fully braided, kept out of her neck.
“What, you’re not keen on waterboarding today?” whistles her doppelganger, dismissively throwing out a queen of hearts. “Shame.”
Zelda lets out a frustrated grunt as she stares at the card on the table.
“I thought we were playing chess,” she points out.
“I don’t know how,” the other Zelda lies, shamelessly. Or, worse, she’s saying the truth, and a mere century without an active duty beat all the class and tact out of her. A simple mistake, and yet she has fallen to a state not far above a dog.
“Then you’ll have to learn,” the real Zelda says, coldly, planting the board between them, burying the queen under it.
She sets up the pieces, while the failed girl sits in stubborn silence. It’s a stubbornness all so familiar, and that familiarity only makes the loathing more bitter.
The warrior Princess of a kingdom that is not crumbled stone goes first. She moves up a pawn, and looks to the other with a cruel expectation.
“What do you even want me to say?” the maiden shrugs, seemingly unbothered. Seemingly. There are maggots crawling under her skin, no doubt. She doesn’t touch a single chess piece.
“I want you to tell me how you fucked up that badly,” Zelda says, calmly. She reaches across, picks up a black pawn and moves it up two squares for the imposter from the wrong timeline.
“The same way you did,” is a simple retort, so simple that it falls apart by the mere fact that they are sitting in the garden of a castle of a kingdom that is not yet a carcass.
“I kept a little more people alive than you did,” candidly, maybe even diplomatically, responds the Princess. She makes her move.
“Touche,” the girl shrugs. She isn’t crying yet, which may be a sign the wilderness steeled her a little better than practice battlefields. Zelda doesn’t choose to see it that way. She chooses to see a lack of shame, a pathetic disrespect of a worm who has no ability to do anything but uselessly thrash.
“How much blood is on your hands?” Zelda asks, watching closely as the leech finally lifts her finger to move a knight. “How much viscera had to be absorbed into your bag of flesh for it to finally do something?”
Green eyes look up, linger for a second, and look back down. The knight is placed down with a deliberate thump. She leans back in her seat.
“What about you, hm? Is that skirt comfortable for killing? Did daddy give you that medal? Do the army boys like you?”
Zelda smirks like a knife wound spreading across her face, droplets of scarlet seeping out.
“Link likes me very much, thank you,” she crows, pressing down a piece with vigor.
The wretched girl has the nerve to laugh.
“I’m glad he does,” she says, a smirk that needs to be ripped out of her sinful skin immediately.
“Mipha does, too,” Zelda adds, watching with satisfaction as her double’s hand flinches above a rook. “Revali has been giving me some archery lessons. Daruk says I shine brighter by the day.”
She has to move her hand away to stop the trembling.
“Urbosa is very proud of me.”
Both despised hands clutch at the blue sleeves, dirtied by scaling cliffs and patched up by calloused fingers.
Zelda leans in, imagines grabbing those choppy golden locks and pulling at the scalp until she sees a grimace of pain.
“Do you even remember their faces?”
A tear slowly, agonizingly streaks down sunkissed skin, a second follows it right after. Zelda delights in standing above this mess, this version of her that killed everyone and everything, this girl that refuses to repent.
“Oh,” the girl with a century old face says. She looks up into the malicious green eyes that don’t look like a reflection, and her own are filled with so much fire Zelda almost jumps back, hair standing at the back of her neck. “All the mirrors in your quarters must be covered with cloth.”
Zelda recoils, shattering into a million pieces. Her boots, her skirt, her commander jacket, her green eyes, her pale neck, her braid – they all begin existing separately, wailing out in their own voices, before reforming back into a startled Princess.
She clutches the table as she sits back down, shaking the chessboard.
“When did you last look at yourself, holy maiden?” the girl that has no right to raise her voice continues, louder. “You are a dog, kneeling at the feet of Kings knowing full well your legacy is matrilineal. You know, and yet you allow your power to be reigned in, and all for what? For the fear? Are you scared? Scared of what could’ve happened, what might happen again? Scared that if you don’t pray every night a horrifying fate will come out of your closet and eat you whole, this time?”
Zelda squeezes her eyes shut, eyebrows furrowed in a rage she yields so it doesn’t mellow out into despair.
“You call me dog,” she says, opening her eyes into narrow slits. “Of the Goddess, the King, the military, perhaps.”
She feels gravity pull her down into the chair, and she hopes, with bitter stubbornness, the girl with choppy fire on her head feels that gravity, too.
“But when it comes down to dust, and she, inevitably, reaches out her hand, which one of us will, fruitlessly, bite more?”
The gravity is all around them now, in the air, whispering and nibbling at their fingernails.
“I will,” admits Zelda, the broken one, the one who took too long, the one who had all her friends die, the one who held off the Calamity for a century and the one who governs desolate stone. She admits it with her voice clear, resounding, breaking through the fabric of space.
“But at least,” she continues, reaching out towards the chess board. “Unlike you, I’ll get a taste of my own sweet blood, before I go up in flames.”
She slams down her queen onto the board with thunder, breaking the rules, breaking time, and the queen of hearts buried underneath the wooden domain of tactics wails with laughter.